CHAPTER XIV. THE LAST JOURNEY, by A. Keith Borrowdale

WE DREW TO A HALT at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile from the base of the Comet. It was evening now, early evening. The silver of the rocket’s slender hull glowed red and mauve in the long light of the dying sun. Beyond her spear-point tip the two little moons of Mars went circling, small Phobos joyous in her haste, contrasting strangely with the stillness of the scene confronting us.

The Canals converged to form one dense central enclosure around the Comet’s gigantic tripod. There were eight of them—eight Vivores, therefore, lurking close, to control and paralyze us with their concerted power. More, more perhaps were already on their silent creeping way across the plain.

The woods have come up and are standing round in deadly crescent . . .

Deadly indeed. Even more deadly-seeming in their patient stillness and silence. They waited—they only waited.

There was no hint of Cloud. The Vivores knew by now that we were impervious to its effect. There was no need even to attempt to use the yellow weapon: the combined intelligence of so many of those vast and living Brains was enough. There was no sign either in all the scene of any groups of the Terrible Ones. Perhaps the Vivores had had no opportunity in their rapid journey across the plains to collect within their orbit any of those ponderous slaves—again, in any case, they must have known that we could deal with the Terrible Ones with the flame-throwing weapons. They had nothing—nothing with which to combat us: except . . . themselves; immobile, bodiless, blind, deaf; but knowing everything and possessing an incalculable hypnotic power.

It was Michael who, at the thought of the flame throwers, suggested their possible use against the Vivores. But a moment’s reflection showed us their uselessness.

“They might suffice indeed.” said Dr. Kalkenbrenner drily. “They would destroy those living Brains, shrivel them up, if once—if once—we could get close enough to use them! A bullet from a revolver might at least incapacitate—but you know yourself, Michael, that your own guns were useless when you confronted Discophora. They were in your hands all the time—yet what could you do with them?”

“The cannon, then,” said Mike desperately, “the little cannon on the tractor—or even the machine gun?”

“I reckon,” our leader answered very quietly, “I reckon, my friends, that where we stand now is as close as we can venture to the rocket without coming under the influence of those gathered Discophora. A quarter of a mile. There are so many of them—their orbit is immense, and their control will be less gradual than from a single Vivore. Tell me if the cannon would be effective at that distance, Michael, even if we knew where the Vivores are in those forests. Tell me if the machine gun could help us from here. We need larger weapons—larger than we have—larger than we could ever have carried. . . . As we approach to within firing range, so also do we approach within their range; and our fingers would refuse to obey us when we tried to fire!”

His tone was detached and cool. Its very calmness sent a shiver through us all as we realized fully, for the first time fully, exactly what we faced.

“It might even be worse than that, much worse,” he added a moment later. “Our very guns might be used against ourselves! Who knows, Jacqueline, but that as we go through that forest there, a power beyond your control might make you snatch your brother’s revolver and turn it against him? Miss Hogarth is her own fiancé’s deadliest danger—my own niece might aim at me! No—no. Our first step of all is to throw aside our weapons—to leave them here before we advance one further step.”

We heard him in horrified silence—and watched him as he unbuckled his revolver- and cartridge-belt and sent it hurtling, with the weapons themselves, far, far behind, till it fell with a little puff of red dust in the sands of the desert. One by one, compelled by the nightmare image he had conjured, we followed suit.

His next step was to move to the front of the tractor toward the cannon and machine-gun mountings. We thought for a moment that he meant to disconnect them also, but instead we saw him jam the mounting in such a way that the weapons could point only forward—could not be swung backward to face into the vehicle. When he had completed the work he threw away the adjustment mechanism: the guns now pointed irrevocably away from the tractor, as also did the flame throwers when he had treated them likewise.

“These,” he said, when he saw our questioning glances, “might help a little. As we go forward—and we must go forward—we shall have set them in action, jammed them so that they stay in action. It might achieve something. One Brain may be put out of action if it comes into the tractor’s path, and so lessen our burdens. At least the flames will clear a pathway through the Ridge plants. For the same general reasons I propose to set the tractor in motion when the time comes and remove most of its controls, so that even if we have an impulse to change direction or go more slowly, we shall be physically unable to do anything about it. The only mechanisms I shall leave untouched are the brakes and the ignition key. We must pray to heaven that I shall have sufficient will power to stop the tractor when we reach the rocket itself.”

So then, laboriously, our plans were made. We saw, with every moment that passed, that our only hope lay, indeed, in ourselves—in our own ability to concentrate all our efforts toward success. All the time, as we went forward, we would be subject to an intolerable command not to go forward; our every instinct would be to defeat our own purposes.

We jammed our oxygen breathing equipment, so that we would be unable to act on any impulse to switch it off. We broke the latching mechanisms of our helmets, knowing that once we were aboard the Comet—if we ever reached the Comet—we would be able to find tools to disconnect them again. We made other similar preparations; and all the time, as we worked, the sun sank lower and lower: the moment approached when the Martian night would fall with all its tropical swiftness. Whatever happened, we had to start our last long Martian journey before darkness enveloped us to add to our danger.

Swiftly, Kalkenbrenner disconnected the trailer. It was essential that we should travel through the forest at speed—the highest speed to which we could mount. Somehow, somehow, we would all have to crowd into the tractor itself—packed close, but with some measure of safety in that very closeness, since each of us could watch the others for any signs of weakness.

Always, as we worked, MacFarlane helped us with advice. He knew, more bitterly than any of us, the power of the controlling Brains. Only once, toward the end of our preparations, did he make mention of McGillivray and Malu. As the moment approached for our journey, he shook his head sadly, looking back across the wastes we had traveled toward the distant Ridge where lay the Albatross.

“If only,” he said, in hardly more than a whisper, “if only they were with us!”

“We can do nothing,” said Kalkenbrenner quietly. “We cannot go back—he would not even wish us to go back. Before heaven, MacFarlane, my own deepest desire is to stay! We have done nothing here—achieved no single one of the scientific purposes I had hoped for. But until we can combat those creatures—” and he waved toward the silent forests ahead, “—we must only return to Earth. We have the young people to think of—we have our own very lives to think of. We cannot stay here, to be surrounded further by yet others of those monsters—to be utterly destroyed by them—and worse than destroyed, if it is their intention to use us as McGillivray once said: as living sacrifices toward their own need for survival. We must go—and we will go. I do not know—I know no more than any of you—what the end may be, what McGillivray intended in his effort to save us. He may already be dead back there, he and Malu. There is nothing we can do for them in the course they have chosen. We must go on.”

And so, at the last, our moment came. We steeled ourselves toward it. Each one of us knew his duty—each one of us knew the part to be played. We took our places in the little tractor, our faces pale, determined, our hearts as calm as we could make them.

Our leader, upon whom so much depended, gave one last look around at us, sketched over for confirmation the plan we had formed. Then he too mounted to his place. The tractor pointed straight across the plain toward the rearing Comet, ready for its own dying journey, for it too would have to be abandoned when we reached our destination.

Kalkenbrenner revved the engine, nodded to me to be ready to set the guns and the flame throwers into action at the moment when I first began to feel the influence of the Vivores stealing over me.

We went forward, gathering speed; and Providence alone knows the thoughts crowding in upon us as we approached the silent menace lying between us and safety.

We won through. You must know, you who read, that we did win through, or this account of our last strange journey would never have been written. Here, at the end, when all should mount to a final searing climax, I feel most my inadequacy as a writer. It is not possible—not in any way possible—for me to convey even the merest suggestion of the horror we encountered. I would face a thousand physical dangers—I would undertake to write, in all fullness, an account of them thereafter; but to describe the silent nightmare of our journey is beyond me forever.

I remember only, as we advanced, that I was filled at the first with an ineffable sadness—a sense, somehow, in spite of all that had been achieved, of strange failure. I thought of those we had abandoned—I thought of all that might have been done in the alien world to which we had traveled so long before, as it seemed. I thought of our friends on distant Earth, toward which, with heaven’s help, we might within the hour be speeding. I looked into the pale mauve sky—was overwhelmed, yes, even at such a moment, by a sense of the unutterable beauty of all the scene surrounding—yes, even of the dark green forest toward which we sped: the great olive sheaths of the plant we would always think of as alisma, the wonders of the sentient cactus creatures on all sides, the rearing distant line of the Martian hills, fretted against the last sky. . . . I saw all these things, felt all these things; and marveled at the infinite bounty of nature.

I felt Katey’s gloved hand in my own—looked around to see her pale quiet face within the helmet, smiling a final salutation. Perhaps, perhaps we looked our last upon each other. I made to whisper some few inadequate words to her—then recollected, with a strange reserving foolishness, even then, even at such a moment, that whatever I said would be heard by all our companions; and so said nothing—only smiled, as she did. . . .

We all were silent—all silent. We clustered together in the speeding tractor, our eyes ahead. We waited, waited—as also waited the enemies before us. Never, never before in all human history was so strange a battle joined—so silent, so subtle a battle, with no other weapons than those of the mind, with no other banner to carry us forward to the attack than simple human hope.

And suddenly—unexpectedly almost, even although we were prepared for it—the battle was joined, at the very moment when we were approaching the forest wall, the tossing barrier of the Ridge plants now writhing at last with life. They must have waited, the Vivores must have waited, until long, long after we had, in fact, entered their orbit of control, so that their attack, when it concertedly came, would be more powerful, more compelling than any gradual mounting of control would have been. I remembered only to set our little weapons into action—even then was assailed by a desperate wish not to touch and jam the controls; and the silence was broken by a harshness of sound, nightmarish in its alien impact on the silent battlefield.

And I recall little else than that—in all the circumstances I recall indeed little else than that. Not one of us is able to remember the detailed movement of the conflict—how could we, when our own minds were the veritable battlefield after all?—when our thoughts were a chaos, a confusion of conflicting impulses? We longed, longed to stop the tractor—to destroy the very tractor. We longed to defeat our own so careful plan—to surrender, to go forward quietly into the great swamps before us, to submit to the gigantic intelligences commanding us. Yet somehow, fighting desperately to retain control—somehow we did go forward. The great soft tossing plants went down before us, crushed and blasted. Amid all other horrors possessing us was a sense of unbearable primitive agony from them as their tissue withered and died. Soft puffy wisps of the Yellow Cloud encircled us, no longer ejected as a weapon, but expired, as it were, by the dying plants as we fought our way through them. I saw Kalkenbrenner’s face at one moment, twisted with an intolerable effort as he resisted the impulse to switch off the ignition, to apply the brakes before we had reached our goal. I saw the children huddled together, striving even physically, with desperate movements of the hands, arms, shoulders, to keep from attempting to tear off their jammed helmets, from leaping out from the tractor to what seemed, oh seemed, like safety in the hidden heart of the morass . . . !

From first to last there was no sign of any of the Vivores themselves: somewhere, somewhere in the steamy depths, they remained hidden, their thoughts alone encompassing us. But always and always, as we struggled, our minds were full of the gigantic images of them—the white loose nightmares that they were.

And now above us loomed at last the rocket—yet the bitterest stage of all was still to be faced. In a contortion of endeavor, our leader brought the tractor to a halt, the flame throwers still spouting, the guns ablaze. Like creatures bewitched, our movements laborious and tormented, we left our places in the prearranged order, fought forward across the last small intervening space. Once Maggie turned—I heard a cry, a scream from her within my helmet; she made to run toward the forest. It was Michael who gripped her and held her until she had refound her strength and stumbled clumsily forward with the rest of us.

The ladder now—but the power of the Vivores stronger, always stronger. As I mounted, as I followed the children and Katey up the long, long extent of the last barrier, I bit my lips to blood in resisting the temptation to throw myself out and away—to fall into the soft lush comfort, as it seemed, of the clustering forest below. Behind me, at one moment, there was a soft moan from MacFarlane, who more than any of us was in torment from his own previous experiences; but an instant later, and at heaven knows what cost, there came a sharp, even brutal command from Dr. Kalkenbrenner to restrain him from the biting impulse to let go.

Our limbs half-paralyzed, our bodies scarcely obeying the last shreds of control left to us, we fell one by one across the threshold of the rocket’s cabin. I heard, I recall, a last spluttering from the now empty machine gun far below; then I was crawling forward, crawling like an animal, one thought, one only in me now: to destroy the rocket launching mechanism before Kalkenbrenner could reach it. In an ecstasy of hatred against myself I set to clambering over the instrument panel toward the master switch, to break, to shatter it utterly.

Our leader knew—he saw my intention. It must have burned also in him, that impulse; yet with a last gigantic effort he overcame it—and defeated me. In a gush of thankfulness I felt myself pushed aside—felt myself roll and fall against the wall. He had somehow, on entering the rocket, closed the great door of the entrance hatch. Now he too, with everything in readiness if only he could reach the master switch, he too went crawling and clambering toward the control panel as I had done—but with different motives.

His hand was outstretched. He fought. I saw from his white screwed face how hard he fought. His eyes burned out toward the master switch as he reached for it—closer and closer—his fingers trembling, quivering in the desire to touch it and yet not to touch it. I fought his battle with him—we all did, crouching helplessly in the cabin there: longed, longed for him to reach the switch—longed, longed for him not to reach the switch.

He failed. At the last he was defeated. I knew he was defeated. I saw his hand fall back, fall back. I knew that a moment more and all would be lost—that we would be compelled, each one of us, to crawl across the cabin floor once more, this time to retreat from the rocket and eternal safety—to fall down into the green horror surrounding us. I saw MacFarlane, his expression a mingling of bitter shame and still more bitter relief, lift his own hand to release the catch of the door. I saw Kalkenbrenner fall still farther back from the panel, weak and helpless. . . .

And then, almost beyond the last, in that one moment when our salvation hung in the balance, my ears were filled with a strange far roaring sound. I thought for a moment that Kalkenbrenner had reached the switch after all—that what I heard was the sound of the booster-rocket in action; but I knew that he had not touched the switch—that we were motionless still upon the Martian surface, that our ship would never rise at all, never.

Yet the sound I heard intensified—it filled my very being. I saw MacFarlane, his hand now no more than an inch from the door catch, look down toward the plain and his whole face transfigure in a moment, his whole expression change to one almost of exultation.

I knew nothing—nothing. Except that instantly, miraculously, the great burden lightened. All, all that had oppressed me fell away—I was suddenly free and myself again; at the very moment when, with a cry of triumph, a veritable scream of triumph, Kalkenbrenner leaped forward, a free man also, and threw over the switch.

The great ship rocked, then steadied herself. The mighty blast of the booster drowned all other sound. The others now were on their feet, their expressions ecstatic. I saw, outside, from where I lay, the darkening sky light up with a great outbursting of flame. We soared higher, still higher, the menace now far, far behind us. I saw MacFarlane, still motionless by the doorway, looking down through the little porthole in it; and his eyes were wet with tears. I rose and moved toward him; yet before I could reach him to see what he so strangely saw, the booster fell away, the great main engines of the rocket roared into life, and our senses all swam into blackness as we hurtled farther and farther into space, the Angry Planet, upon which we so nearly had met our deaths, already many thousands of miles away.

Beyond the velvet void, across the gigantic reaches confronting us, lay our own quiet Earth—lay safety. As we traversed those incalculable miles we learned and marveled at the truth—learned how it was, after all, that a desperate promise made had been fulfilled; how much had been dared by the man we had left behind and by his companion to bring us to safety; how, at that last moment, when all hung in the balance, the deadly influence of the Vivores had been destroyed, so that Kalkenbrenner’s hand could at last go forward to the master switch.

The story ends. My part in it is played. I set aside my pen.

Three months after that moment when the gallant action of Dr. McGillivray brought us to safety, we reached our Earth indeed, so concluding in triumph, but also in deepest sorrow, the Third Martian Expedition, the first full flight of the spaceship Comet. Much, much had been left undone—but also much had been achieved. We had at least returned safely—had fulfilled our own promise to bring back the young people and one, if only one, of the men we had gone to find.

The story ends; but beyond it lies another story, still to be told and to which also, with heaven’s help, I may be permitted to contribute: the story of the projected Fourth Expedition to the Angry Planet, when, as it is hoped, once more under the leadership of Dr. Kalkenbrenner, we shall set out yet again to master the mysteries of our nearest true neighbor in space.

May I, then, in concluding my own task, say only, both to those who may believe and those who may not believe—the eternal doubters who see nothing more, perhaps, than a pleasant fiction in these patient pages of ours—may I say only, with my companions of the Third Expedition: Dr. Kalkenbrenner, Catherine Hogarth, Michael Malone, Margaret Sherwood, Paul and Jacqueline Adam, Stephen MacFarlane: only au revoir! and so sign myself, in all sincerity—

A. Keith Borrowdale