CHAPTER VIII. LOOMINGS, by A. Keith Borrowdale[3]

OUR FIRST STEP when we landed on Mars (as Dr. Kalkenbrenner has already said) was to set about attaching the prefabricated booster rocket to the under part of the Comet, so as to be prepared for a departure at any moment. The work was comparatively simple—every detail had been carefully worked out beforehand; and even allowing for the extreme haste with which all our final preparations had to be made on Earth, there were no undue complications.

As the Comet stood on its gigantic tripod undercarriage, extending from the three great fins at its tail, a secondary and wider entrance hatch was opened in its side, giving access to what I may call the “hold,” beneath the main living cabin. From this, a small but powerful derrick lowered the component parts of the booster, then swung them into position and held them firm for assembly.

While this work was going forward, the young folk, needless to say, were having the time of their lives. After the long period of near-imprisonment in the small cabin of the spaceship, they were like puppies—leaped, skipped and ran with a complete happy abandon. Katey, I may add, was as delighted as any of them to be free. Like Maggie, she was being introduced for the first time to the extraordinary sensation of being almost three times as strong (or as light, rather) on Mars as upon Earth. She went sailing twelve and thirteen feet in the air in huge jumps, and—

“Look—look, Archie,” she cried, as she glided serenely above my head while I worked at the booster assembly, “what wouldn’t I give to be able to do this back home! I’d make my fortune as an act at the Palladium! And the air! It’s like bubbly—dear old bubbly!”

And she soared past me again, with the others beyond, like so many figures in a presentation of Peter Pan. . . .

On all sides of us as we worked and played, stretched the vast reddish plain, extending to the high-upthrusting mountains for which we had roughly aimed in our descent. And although I was seeing a Martian landscape for the first time, there was something truly familiar in it all, from the descriptions I had heard from the others during the journey: the loose sandy soil, the clustering groups of the “cactus plants” with their great fleshy fingers thrust up into the unbelievable bluish-mauve sky.

And I was particularly interested, indeed, in these plants, remembering all I had heard of their primitive thinking faculties: I wondered, as I looked out from the working cradle, if even at that moment strange messages were rustling among them toward the distant hills—messages telling of the arrival of yet another uncanny shape from the skies; and the thought for a moment was even a little eerie, for all I knew of the fundamental friendliness of the creatures.

I saw at one moment that Jacky, the most serious of the young people, had crossed toward one small cluster of cacti, colored with bright spots of red and orange on the darker green, and was standing solemnly before it with a most intent expression on her face; and I had the notion that she was, as it were, trying to . . . send a message, almost—perhaps to that old friend of hers, Prince Malu.

And one strange thing was that, as I gazed down from my perch at the alien scene, I had, myself, for the first time, a sudden picture of the physical appearance of the Beautiful People. Of course, we had talked about them endlessly too—about Malu himself, and the Center: these creatures—and the squat-shaped Terrible Ones—had been described a hundred times to Maggie and Katey and the Doctor and me. Jacky—who was good at drawing—had made sketches of them, so that, from all that had been said and seen, we had an excellent idea of what they looked like. But quite apart from this, there was an added awareness, almost, that first day of our Martian landing: I had a clear kind of vision inside my head of Prince Malu—of his slender trunk, a little more than five feet high perhaps, with its gentle colorings of pale green and patchy yellow and the flaming “flower” surmounting the bulbous upper end . . . and the thought came into me that for the first time I was experiencing—in a broad and general way as yet—true Martian telepathy. It was as if, as Jacqueline thought toward the plants, they thought back toward her, and the whole concentrated image from those myriads of primitive “minds” came strangely into my mind. . . .

I saw too, in the same way, a vision of the other species of Martian encountered by the previous expedition: the creatures known (in the “language” of the Beautiful People) as the Terrible Ones: great egg shapes, each the size of a small ox, spotted yellow and red, moving also on detached root tendrils but, unlike the Beautiful People, with the appearance at least of faces, caused by the two huge “jaw petals.”

I saw it all indeed before Jacky moved back from the plant cluster in front of which she had been standing. And I saw, fleetingly, something else—but less perfectly: a confused image of something white and yielding—a great vibrant, pulsating something, against a thick background of dark, dark green. . . .

The vision lasted for only a moment—but it was a moment charged with a sense of intolerable menace. I saw from Jacky’s face that she too had seen the vision—it was why she had moved away from the friendly cluster of the cacti.

I returned more soberly now to my work. It was almost complete—the unexpected lightness of the materials I handled made it possible to assemble the booster much more quickly than we had reckoned. With the Doctor I descended at last to the ground to complete the work on our other equipment; and then my spirits were restored by the sight of the excellent meal which Katey had prepared after her exuberant jumping game.

Bacon and eggs!—brought all the way from distant Earth. Dehydrated eggs and salt bacon—but bacon and eggs!—and our first solid meal for almost three months. And coffee—fresh coffee, its fragrance rising strangely in the brisk evening air. . . .

We sat back when the meal was over, sighing contentedly, and suddenly weary from the concentrated bout of exercise. Above us the little moons revolved—almost comically in their unusual haste, to our Earth eyes. All was still—unutterably still. And in the mood of the moment, in our relaxed weariness—the anticlimax to all our weeks of tense endeavor and strain in the spaceship—there came over us a strange melancholy; and—in me at least—a sudden misery of doubt and apprehension: would we survive the nightmare lying perhaps ahead?

And what was the nightmare? What were the creatures we knew only as the Vivores? How did they differ, as Martians, from the Beautiful People—even from the Terrible Ones? I recalled the thin chattering we had heard—so long before, it seemed—from Roddy Mackellar’s airstrip; the despairing voice from great space: “The Creeping Canals—Discophora—the Vivores—in heaven’s name try to save us from them . . . !”

We had, throughout our approach to Mars, made many attempts to contact MacFarlane, wherever he was. We knew, from our calculations, his rough position—we knew the general nature of his transmission equipment. Message after hopeful message we sent as we speeded toward the Angry Planet. But silence—always silence. Only once, as we journeyed in the rocket, was there anything distantly resembling one of the old Morse messages. On this occasion, after we had been tuned for some hours—at a distance of barely three hundred thousand miles from the Martian surface—we had received, imperfectly, desperately imperfectly, a few broken impulses—so faintly and confusedly as indeed to be uncertain as impulses at all. If they spelled anything they spelled the irrelevant and impossible words—Guinea pigs; and so we dismissed them as freaks—as illusions.[4]

The Yellow Cloud . . . As we sat there so quietly, on our own first peaceful Martian evening, I remembered the bitterness of Dr. McGillivray’s experience—his landing so different from our own. From the first, as we had come in to landfall, we had watched for any sign of the mysterious Yellow Cloud. As Dr. Kalkenbrenner and I had worked, while the others played, we both, I know, had turned anxious eyes across the whole wide plain, ready for instant action if, even for a moment, we should see anything presaging trouble. But the blue-mauve, cloudless sky was empty—all was clear.

Now, as the mauve tint deepened to pink and then to smoky red with the fall of evening, we gazed again along the vast horizon, in particular toward the south, where, if our guess was accurate, the Albatross lay—if indeed she still existed.

Was it only imagination? Was there, hovering above a low outjutting line of foothills, a thick ochreous . . . mist, almost? A mere coloration of the evening sky?

I glanced uneasily toward the Doctor. He too remained with his gaze fixed in the same direction. He turned to me and shook his head a little. And a moment later, before the others had a chance to see anything, he gave, as captain of our expedition, the word to retire.

We mounted the long ladder one by one, ready indeed to rest after the unaccustomed excitement, the sheer physical weariness of our first few hours on the Angry Planet.

The Doctor and I lingered by the thick plastic windows of the Comet long after the others had drifted to sleep. We stared apprehensively southward, until, with a swiftness comparable to the swiftness of tropical nightfall upon Earth, the whole sky darkened. The little moons shone forth with an intense silvery light across the immensity below us, and all was still.

When we woke in the bright morning, after a night no shorter- or longer-seeming than a night on Earth (the Martian day is very nearly equal to our own, being 24 hr. 37 min. 22.6 sec. in duration, compared with Earth’s 23 hr. 56 min. 4.1 sec.), it was to find that the sky was empty once more of any tinge of yellow.

We breakfasted substantially and in a mood of mounting tension; for immediately afterward we proposed to embark on our mission of rescue—to face, with what courage we could muster, whatever horror it was that threatened our gallant colleagues.