CHAPTER III. MacFARLANE’S NARRATIVE CONTINUED

I FOUND HIM. There is little point in delaying the announcement of the fact, in building an atmosphere of suspense for the sake of creating a cheap dramatic effect. You know full well, from the messages we have already exchanged, that he is by my side now—and therefore I found him.

But I did not find him without difficulty. And there was a bittersweetness in the success of my long search.

Andrew McGillivray, by a desperate stroke of irony, has seen none of the marvels of the new world he traveled so far to explore. From that day to this he has been blind.

And worse—much worse. The great clear mind which had brought us so far, achieved so much, has been shadowed over a little from the agonies of that moment when he was snatched into the Cloud.

As I sit here now, in the small enclosure near the approaching Canal from which we do not dare to remove ourselves, it is to see him at some slight distance away from me, quietly staring with his unseeing eyes toward the great dark swamps which contain (to me, who have seen) so much nightmare. He sways a little—forms his lips occasionally in silent words and phrases.

There are moments—many, many moments—when his mind is as clear as it ever was, when he is normal and healthy; almost the old Doctor Mac I knew in the Pitlochry days. But there are other moments when he seems to sink into a deep indifference—to forget where he is and even who he is.

And it goes deeper—much deeper. There is even a fear in me that I too . . . but no—not yet—and a thought not to be faced. But if once I do yield to the strange, awesome creature now confronting us, whom yet I have to describe—

But not yet; there is much else to be recounted. . . .

On that first hopeless morning of our landing I stayed for a long time by the porthole staring out into the swirling yellow fog. I saw now, clearly, that it was no ordinary mist as we might know it upon Earth, but a great seething mass of diminutive scurrying particles, seed shapes—million upon million of them, hurtling forward in one direction. And I had the impression too, recollecting the period when the door had been open, that they were not wind-borne; there had been no sound of hurricane—no shrill scream—as one again might have heard it on Earth; the spores (I use the word now, since we established later that they were indeed a kind of spore) traveled nightmarishly of their own volition!—and silently, devilishly silently, as all else on Mars. . . .

And also—can I confess it?—it was as if there came to me, even through the thick perspex of the window, an emanation of unutterable wickedness. In the strange Martian telepathic medium of communication it was as if the very spores were wishing us ill. There were no articulate words from them in my mind—no definable thoughts as such; no more than a deep uneasiness—a malevolent hypnotic sense from those trillions of rushing particles of living dust.

The Cloud swept on—for hours and many hours. But at last I had an impression that it was thinning a little—the very lessening of the pressure of the evil thoughts was an indication that the storm was passing.

Rapidly I set to exploring our clothing store for some kind of protective garments. I found waterproofs and thick hip-boots—an asbestos helmet, even, and a complete suit of a similar fireproof material packed by Mac in case we should ever encounter another volcanic eruption on the Angry Planet.

I swathed myself—wore also my oxygen mask with the gas itself switched off from the cylinder—found fireproof gloves and bound my head around with cloths.

And by this time, indeed, the yellowness outside had almost gone. I was able to distinguish, beyond the slight saucer in which the spaceship lay, a vast extending plain of the Martian type familiar to us: a great level stretch of reddish sandy soil with distant mountain ranges beyond—high, conelike mountains, since in their formation in the far depths of Martian history the planet’s gravity pull was less than Earth’s, and so threw the ranges more narrowly upward.

I saw even the tall clustering shapes of the old familiar cactuslike plants, in their groups of varying sizes, the long fleshy fingers upstretched to the sky; and at the spectacle much of my fear departed. They were veritably like a glimpse of home.

I waited a little longer. On the plain outside there still hovered an occasional drifting wisp of Cloud, speeding low-lyingly. One or two of the big cactus plants were yellowly tinged for a moment; but gradually the clinging spores seemed to detach themselves and make off. The same had happened to the thinning film of them which had clung to our rocket windows—as if they were spies, indeed, peering inward—exploring the mysteries of the strange shape on the plain.

So at last—very cautiously at first, lest there might be a trap, lest even some poisonous effect from the Cloud still lingered—I prepared to leave the rocket. I lowered myself slowly down the small metallic rope ladder, my free hand ready at the oxygen-control switch of my mask, if there should be any breathing difficulty. But all was well. On the ground I very gently exposed for a moment a small skin area at my wrist—waited for any sign of irritation—then joyously, when I felt no effect at all, took off both gloves and ventured to remove my mask altogether.

For a moment I stayed silent, then called out, “Mac—Mac—where are you, Mac?”

And my voice went thinly, dispersingly, across the vast silent plain.

I called again, took a step forward—and found myself instantly rolling clumsily over the shifting red soil a good twenty feet from the rocket. I had forgotten again the weaker gravitational pull! (The actual ratio to the Earth’s gravity pull is in the nature of .38), as I remember from our previous experiments: thus, a man weighing 150 pounds on Earth would weigh only 57 on Mars, yet be muscularly equipped to move his full 150. . . .

I steadied myself—called again—ventured farther and farther from the rocket in the direction I assumed Mac might have taken when he seemed to have been snatched into the Cloud.

Then suddenly, as I stumbled forward, still unaccustomed a little to the different gravitational conditions, I became aware—more and more powerfully aware—of a strange urge to change direction, to move obliquely to the right. It was as if I knew, entirely confidently, that I would find him there; and, at the very moment of turning in my tracks, the solution broke over me: the plants—the clustering groups of the cactus plants on all sides—they were guiding me!

We had landed on a different part of the planet, many, many miles from the site of our previous landing. In spite of all our careful calculations, our attempt to revisit the home territory of the Malu group of the Beautiful People, that had been inevitable. But nevertheless, as we afterward discovered, the plants here knew us—or knew of us; for we had grown, it seemed, in the interval between the two trips, to some kind of legend among these strange sentient creatures: we were the “strangers from across the skies”—the friends of the plant masters, the Beautiful People.

You will know that the static, leathery cactus plants of the Martian plains are too primitive to be capable of coherent thought. From them, either to us or to the Beautiful Ones, there come only general impulses of a telepathic nature—broad messages of danger, of discovery, of disturbance and the like. The Beautiful People themselves are much more highly developed. They had, in the distant past, uprooted themselves from the enchaining soil—and so are capable of movement on the clustering tendrils at the base of their slender trunks, in a broad resemblance to walking or shuffling. They had also developed their original sensitivity to light. (Many Earth plants are noticeably sensitive to light—the sunflower, for an example—and many can move on detached root tendrils—the iris, the convolvulus, even the humble vegetable marrow.) So, after many years of evolution, certain cellular areas near the “flower” on the top of the Martian trunk stem have become virtually “eyes.” And the smaller side tendrils, like the snaky “arms” of an octopus, have been developed so as to be able to grasp and hold external objects, like weapons. Thus, the Beautiful People have a physical resemblance, although only distantly, to the human frame itself; and, like us, they have a tradition, a science—they have a whole way of life not without its alien beauty. . . .

But this is an unwarranted digression. Now, under the impulse of the crude directions from the more primitive cactus plants, I leaped and ran joyously across the plain; and found my friend at last—broken, sick unto the very death.

I thought at first that he was dead when I saw him huddled in the shelter of one of the taller plant clusters. I had the impression, as I leaped forward, that he had positively been sheltered there—had been caught in his flight in the Cloud by the great writhing fingerlike leaves of this group of Martian plants, and so had fallen to the ground and been protected from the evil onslaught of the yellow spores. And this I later found to be correct. . . .

I carried him back to the Albatross—it was an easy enough task with my increased strength and his diminished weight.

I tended him—brought him back to life. For many, many days—I lost all count—he lay motionless in the little cabin, staring sightlessly straight ahead. Once or twice he talked incoherently, and in a soft, barely audible voice. And as time went on I formed the impression that he was reliving a kind of dream, a kind of communicated vision which had come into his mind as he had been swept along enwrapped in the evil spore cloud. The one word that kept recurring was: Discophora. Over and over again he muttered it, shudderingly. It was as if a coherent picture of some kind had built itself up within his head, communicated by the trillions of hurrying spores—for they too, like all else on Mars, perhaps had certain broad telepathic powers. He might even have “seen,” in his mind’s eye, something of the source of emanation of the Cloud itself.

“Discophora—discophora . . .”

And one day—suddenly—it recurred to me that as a scientific man he always thought and spoke in scientific terms. We had even joked about it in the past—his habit of referring even to the simple rabbit of the Pitlochry Hills as lepus cuniculus, for example.

Hastily I searched through his small library of scientific books in the cabin.

I found it—yet it made little sense, except for one small particular.

Discophora: the common jellyfish; a hydromedusan or some similar coelenterate; sea-jelly; sunfish. They consist of a whitish, translucent, jellylike substance. Their tentacles bear stinging cells, the effect of which is to benumb, if not kill, any living creature which they touch. . . .

It made little sense indeed—except for that one strange particular. Before me, on the mattress on which he had slept during the long interplanetary journey, was a living creature indeed benumbed—blinded—stunned to mental helplessness by some deadly stinging agency. And I remembered my own brief physical sufferings from the flying particles before I managed to close the cabin doors. . . .

I shuddered and set the book aside. And for a moment it was as if I too had a sudden vision, conveyed to me perhaps from the obsessed mind in the cabin with me, of a gigantic nightmare white jelly, swaying and quivering against a dark tortuous background of . . . of what?

One word more Mac uttered in those first days of his illness. One day he raised himself suddenly, his blinded eyes staring in sudden awe and terror—but with a strange triumph in them too, a triumph I had seen in his healthy eyes many times before when he had made some startling, half-instinctive discovery.

“The Brain,” he cried. “Discophora! The Brain—the Brain!”

There is no way in which I can describe the potent menace he managed to convey in his tone.

The time went on. We had enough food in the cabin for many months if necessary. Gradually, as the days passed, my patient came back to physical health at least, if not yet full mental awareness. But there were signs of improvement even in this direction too.

I seldom ventured outside the rocket—there was no purpose in doing so until Mac should be capable of full movement with me. You who listen to me across the interminable void can have no far notion of the desolate loneliness of those long, long weeks of utter isolation. I was alone in an alien world with a sick, a desperately sick man. The very silence was a source of nightmare—I longed even for one of the rare Martian storms to break it, for at least an eruption, however dangerous, from one of the great volcanoes in the distant mountain ranges.

It was at this time, while I mooned haplessly in the little cabin, that I formed the first wild idea perhaps to make contact with you, my dear John, on distant Earth. The notion was not so fantastic as it may at first appear. It was something that Mac had been contemplating quite seriously, even at the time of our first Martian visit. In the course of his researches among the foothills, he had discovered vast seams of a curious kind of mineral deposit which he suspected to be radioactive in a manner not known upon Earth—in no way dangerously, as in the case of atomic radioactivity. . . . It is not possible—or even necessary—for me to explain more in the course of the present narrative; we can discuss it later—we may even, if we ever meet again (God grant that it may be so!), be able to talk about it face to face. For the moment, the fact remains that we have achieved contact, as you know; at our end here, through the agency of one of those very exposed mineral seams I have mentioned—a great directional aerial, as it were, beaming our messages to you—and picked up by its equivalent, your friend Mackellar’s airstrip.

It was, as I say, in those early days of our return that I first had the notion to explore further the possibilities of such communication—of experimenting at least with some of the complex radio mechanisms which Mac had brought with us in the rocket. I realized that I would have to wait until he himself had further recovered from his illness before any true attempt could be made, for he knew infinitely more of such scientific subjects than I . . . but I did at least spend much time in research among the books of his small library, and even studied his own fairly comprehensive notes on the subject.

And it was one morning when I was sitting in the sunshine beside the rocket, examining those notes, that our long period of loneliness came to an end.

Poor Mac was beside me—he had recovered sufficiently to be able to descend the ladder and take the sun in the little hollow in which the Albatross rested. He had been sitting very quietly for a long time, staring as always straight ahead of him; but suddenly he gave a small strange cry—rose up to his feet with an expression of pleasure such as I had never hoped to see on his face again.

I rose also—followed the direction of his sightless gaze. His arms were outstretched as if in welcome—he moved forward unsteadily across the sandy floor of the saucer.

I saw nothing—was aware of nothing beyond a curious inner excitement in my mind, a sense of waiting—of forthcoming pleasure indeed.

For a long moment nothing happened. I prepared to mount to the rim of the small hollow—to seek out across the plain for any sign of unusual disturbance there.

But before I had progressed more than a few steps, a figure appeared on the sky line above us—a figure slender and familiar for all its strangeness.

It stayed for a moment motionless. The smooth greenish trunk quivered slightly—the bifurcated tendrils at its base were still and poised. Then, swiftly, it came down the sandy slope toward us; and into my head there came the thin, friendly, telepathic “voice” I knew so well.

“Malu,” I cried. “Malu—Malu!”

And the Voice came: “Malu the Tall, Prince of the Beautiful People! Welcome—welcome, O Strangers! Welcome again from the skies! You have come, as we knew you would come. Welcome—oh, welcome!”

In the Voice itself there was no expression—it was one of the features of telepathic communication that there never was. But accompanying the impersonal “words” was such a wave, a sense, of utter warmth and affection as to fill our very hearts with joy after all we had suffered.

So, at last, we came home to Mars!